The Witch of Portobello
Paulo Coelho's The Witch of Portobello, originally published in Portuguese in 2006 and translated into English in 2007, is a layered, mosaic-style novel that tells the life of a single magnetic woman through the voices of nearly everyone who knew her. Athena was born to a Roma mother in Romania, adopted by a Lebanese family, raised in Beirut and London, and given by her foster parents the kind of education that opens every conventional door, an English degree, a banking job, an early marriage, a son. None of it is enough. Through dance, calligraphy, motherhood, ritual, and unconventional teaching, she keeps reaching for what she calls the Mother, the divine principle she believes the modern world has buried. By the time the novel opens, Athena is dead, and the journalist tracking her story can only assemble it from the people who loved, used, fled, or condemned her: her adoptive mother, her ex-husband, her landlord, the actress whose life she upended, the priest who defended her, the journalist who became her chronicler. Coelho weaves these testimonies into a meditation on female spiritual authority, the price of refusing the ordinary, and the way mystics are made by the people who follow them.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Witch of Portobello
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Athena is a Romanian-born woman adopted by a Lebanese family and raised in Beirut and London, where she works at a bank and raises a son alone. Her hunger for a divine mother takes her from a Romanian gypsy grandmother to a calligraphy teacher in Dubai, and a small group of women on Portobello Road.
The Witch of Portobello was written by Paulo Coelho and originally published in Portuguese in 2006. Coelho is also the author of The Alchemist, Brida, and many other spiritual fables.
Yes. The Witch of Portobello shares Paulo Coelho's spiritual-fable style and themes of personal calling. The Witch of Portobello is structured as multiple narrators recounting their experiences with the protagonist Athena, while The Alchemist is a single linear pilgrimage.
The Witch of Portobello is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Witch of Portobello is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.